At a Paris restaurant-gallery with a name fitting to the theme of his exhibition – Nomad’s, on the rue du Marché St-Honoré – French photographer Michael Abraham opened his show Rila: Les Septs Lacs Sacrés (Rila: The Seven Sacred Lakes) on April 29.

Abraham had been coming to Bulgaria for several years before undertaking the current project. On his website, he said that he has felt “at home” here since the beginning, with the mountains, the natural springs, the people and the traditions. In attempting to avoid such cliché phrases like “Eastern Europe”, he said that photographing the Seven Lakes of Rila helped him to express “his Bulgaria”.

The goal of these images is “to capture the pure, primordial energy that emanates from the Seven Rila Lakes region, that which is at the heart of human vitality and well-being. Beyond the advancing illegal construction that is eating into the mountain and its universal force, these images attempt to capture the moments, energies and landscapes that, alas, are on their way to disappearing”, the website read.

On Rila Mountain, at an altitude of about 3000 metres, some 120 lakes – 70 of which date to the Ice Age – comprise part of a UNESCO-recognised national heritage site. The Seven Lakes of Rila are on the north-eastern part of the mountain.

The photographs – semi-gloss prints mounted on aluminium, ranging in size from 100cm x 100cm to 100cm x 300cm – are of the countryside surrounding the lakes; of brightly coloured small structures looking mystically forlorn; a common family bedroom, kilims and weavings lining floor and wall; and the lakes themselves, glimpsed through the lens of time and wear.